That’s Out­ra­geous!

DO WE RE­ALLY NEED THAT?

EGO HY­GIENE Fi­nally—men needn’t risk harm­ing their mas­culin­ity ev­ery time they visit the drug­store. If you haven’t heard, Unilever of­fers the Q-tips Men’s Pack, a bun­dle of cot­ton swabs that are iden­ti­cal to the reg­u­lar ones but prom­ise to be so much more. Ac­cord­ing to the pack­ag­ing, these Q-tips are the “ul­ti­mate multi-tool” and are nec­es­sary for “de­tail­ing, clean­ing and build­ing.” What are men sup­posed to be build­ing in­side their ears? We might never know—and that’s to­tally fine with us.

BAD AF­TER­TASTE

Not ev­ery TV se­ries needs swag. Case in point: in July, wine cu­ra­tors Lot18 an­nounced a col­lec­tion of bot­tles based on The Handmaid’s Tale, Mar­garet At­wood’s book-turned-show in which women are en­slaved by a to­tal­i­tar­ian state. The prod­ucts’ de­scrip­tions left many won­der­ing if they al­ready live in a dystopian fu­ture: “Com­pletely stripped of her rights and free­doms, Of­fred must rely on the one weapon she has left to stay in con­trol—her fem­i­nine wiles. This French Pinot Noir is sim­i­larly se­duc­tive,” read one, re­fer­ring to the se­ries’ pro­tag­o­nist. As it turns out, a tie-in with a story about women be­ing ex­ploited for their re­pro­duc­tive ca­pa­bil­i­ties didn’t make for a pop­u­lar sum­mer pro­mo­tion. Fac­ing back­lash, Lot18 can­celled the wines within 24 hours. Not so blessed were the fruits.

AN OVER­COOKED IDEA

It’s a prob­lem that’s plagued hu­mans since the in­ven­tion of the toaster: you drop your bread into the ap­pli­ance, then watch it emerge charred. Last Jan­uary, Grif­fin Tech­nol­ogy an­nounced it had solved this co­nun­drum with its Con­nected Toaster, which is con­trolled by an app that al­lows users to dial in a tem­per­a­ture and heat­ing time—pref­er­ences it re­mem­bers. While the de­vice was never re­leased due to a lack of cus­tomer in­ter­est, don’t fret: these feats can be ac­com­plished by set­ting a “dumb” toaster’s knobs to the right spot, and leav­ing them there.